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Sunday, 28 June 2015

On Snakes, Encyclicals and Pope Francis's Vision

Is it possible that in these
next six months the fate of our planet will be sealed? It won’t of course feel
like that – life will go on into 2016 and beyond, much as before – but we are
on the very edge of a cliff, with a dangerous and terrifying descent ahead of
us if we slip over it. If this sounds dramatic, too dramatic, that can’t be
helped.

Because the stakes are very
high – nothing less than the future well-being of humanity on this tiny speck
of dust in the cosmos, this precious, awesome, planet with its precious, infinitely-varied
cargo: human and animal and plant, the seas and the skies and the meadows and
the deserts and the mountains - all this superabundance of life and life-forms,
all this complex inter-relationship between the natural world and the human natural
world of living, breathing, struggling humanity: it’s in the balance.

And we sense this, because we
are sensate human beings who appreciate, who glimpse, what it means to say: Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh – ‘holy, holy,
holy, all of life is holy’ – m’lo kol
ha’aretz k’vodo (Isaiah 6:3), ‘the teeming fullness of the earth is
glorious’, the whole earth is full of glorious richness, it’s all glorious
testimony to creation, ongoing unceasing creation. From the 12,000 species of
ant to the 100 trillion synapses in each human brain to the unique patterning
of each snowflake to the molten core of smouldering
volcanoes to the wondrous intricacy of the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm –
creation never stops.

And even if you don’t believe
in a Creator, you are still capable of being in awe of, in knowing the wonder
of, the multiplicity and richness of the natural world and the miraculous
complexity of individual human life and collective human diversity: m’lo kol ha’aretz k’vodo- ‘the whole earth is suffused with something
quite glorious’: us and nature, humans and human nature and the world of
nature, all of it so substantial, and all of it so ephemeral, so fragile, so
transient, ‘like grass that grows in the morning, that grows so fresh in the
morning, and in the evening fades and dies’ (Psalm 90: 6).

And after tens of thousands
of years of slow evolution on this planet, with the pace of human change
speeding up in the last couple of millennia, and then the last two centuries,
and exponentially in the last couple of decades, after all of this collective morning
freshness and growth we suddenly face evening on the planet, and it’s come so
soon, too soon, much too soon, and we are in denial that it is the evening,
that evening is approaching, we don’t want to know, even though the evidence is
all around us that it’s much later in the day than we’d ever realised.

We surely don’t want to know
that “our common home” is being turned into a “pile of filth”. We wince at the
words, the sentiment, but the Pope didn’t mince his words, he didn’t pull his
punches – and we know this is aPope who
can throw a punch. He didn’t hold back in his encyclical from saying it as it
is. In spelling out the peril we face as we render the planet uninhabitable.

This encyclical was an
extraordinary document. It wasn’t addressed – as I believe encyclicals usually
are – only to Catholics. It wasn’t addressed only to Christians. It was
addressed to humanity, to all of us. The Pope didn’t distinguish between Catholic
and non-Catholic, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Because what he was addressing
involves all of us. And what he was speaking about – which had been rumoured to
be an encyclical on the environment - wasn’t just an encyclical on climate
change or a narrow understanding of the environment.

“When we speak of the
‘environment’”, he said, “what we really mean is a relationship existing between
nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as
something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are
part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.”

This is a very Jewish and
holistic understanding – but you rarely hear it from religious leaders of any
kind and Francis spoke of it with a rare and spirited passion: “We are faced not
with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather
with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for
a solution demand an integrated approach combating poverty, restoring dignity
to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

So his message was deeply
moral, deeply spiritual and deeply political – all at the same time. And they
were all of these because the religious perspective he was speaking from
doesn’t see them as separate. Morality, spirituality and politics are
indivisible in this Judaeo-Christian vision. So the care of the natural
environment and the care of those who live within this environment are part of
the same ethical command.

From this point of view the
environment isn’t something ‘out there’ , separate from us. The environmental
crisis is a crisis about relationships, relationships between nature and
humans, about the inter-relationship between nature and human needs. And this
is what makes it inevitable that he has to speak of politics and the “urgent
need for politics and economics to enter into a frank dialogue in the service
of life, especially human life.”

So the Pope held up a mirror
to our current life here on earth and said: look at what we are doing, and look
at what the results are of what we are doing. Look at how we fail to
distinguish between needs and wants. We need medicines but want flat-screen
TVs, we need clean water to drink but want long-haul flights to exotic
destinations, we need arable land and birdsong and coral reefs but we want 4x4s
and off-shore tax havens and free plastic bags in supermarkets.

Our appetites are potentially
unlimited, though our human needs are limited and grounded in the basic prerequisites
of life: nutritious food, fresh air, good relationships, good health,
education, housing, freedom to think and speak and create. The rich, says
Francis – and in a global context those who are reading this are all the rich –
we have our appetites indulged. And the poor, the disadvantaged, the
marginalised, those who struggle to stay alive, who suffer from want of a roof
or a meal – they have their needs denied. And this is a painful message to hear
- we will do anything to get distracted from the underlying moral and spiritual
vision he has brought to bear on the greatest problem we have ever faced on
this planet. Many Jews might disagree with him on the role contraception might
play in limiting population growth, but that difference of perspective shouldn’t
distract us.

For his message was crystal
clear. There can never be a technological solution to the problems that arise in
our world due to unrestrained appetite
because what we are faced with is at root, at heart, a moral problem. And while
greed dominates over need we do nothing but violence to others and to the
planet we inhabit, and there is no future in this. Or rather the future will be
that our planet will become uninhabitable.

And this will happen because,
he says, “we cannot claim to have aculture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and
teaching clear-minded self-restraint”.His call for what he terms “sobriety” is not going to be a message that
will go down well in Wall Street or in the homes of Rupert Murdoch and his
friends. And we will have to wait and see how it is received when Pope Francis
meets with President Obama, and addresses Congress and the UN General assembly
in September, all in the lead up to those crucial negotiations in Paris at the UN-sponsored
Climate Change Conference there at the end of the year.

What the Pope has done in
this encyclical is the equivalent of what God told Moses to do in that strange
text we read this week from the Book of Numbers. It’s one of the most wonderful
and terrifying parables in the Torah (Numbers 21:4-9): the Israelites are
portrayed as a people complaining because their wantswere larger than their needs – they had the
daily miracle of manna but it wasn’t good enough, it’s just “miserable bread”; no,
they wanted variety – and their
punishment is that they are bitten to death by serpent-snakes. And these snakes
are a brilliantly apposite metaphor for the insatiability of human desires,
gnawing away inside us, attacking us, biting into us with their toxic fury, ‘I
want, I want, I want...’, endless, insatiable wants (wants not needs), making
us miserable when we can’t have more, or better, or different, or something
new. These snakes are deadly – they can kill us, literally, or they just kill
off our liveliness, our well-being.

And God tells Moses that the
only antidote to this plague is to look at it clearly. Take a bronze serpent,
he says, and put it on top of a pole, hold it above the people so that they can
see clearly what is causing them the pain. When they are bitten, the only cure
is to look at a representation, a picture , an image of what has done the
damage. The psychology of this is spot-on. Only by looking at what you fear can
you be healed. Look at it, keep looking at it – clear-sightedness is what you
need to keep you alive. Don’t turn away, don’t refuse to look, look at what is
doing the damage. That’s what the text of the Torah says, and that’s what
Francis is saying. He has given us the picture - he has presented, represented,
the problems we face, held them aloft and said: ‘We need to look, clear-sightedly,
at this. This is what is killing us. But it can be different.’

And that it can be different
– if enough people look, with enough clarity of vision, and with enough
humility and with enough sober commitment to self-restraint, personally,
collectively – this gives us a glimmer of hope. That ‘what is’ does not have to
translate into ‘what has to be’ is a source of hope. It’s maybe why the Pope,
courageously in the circumstances,called his encyclical Laudato Sii
– ‘Praised Be’. That’s Hallelu!

In these next six months we
will see who can bear to look and who can’t, who can face the need to change
and who can’t, who can face the idea of less, and who can’t, who can accept the
limits to appetites, and who can’t. Praised be the clear-sighted ones for they
shall inherit the earth. Praised be the restrainers of growth, the limiters of
untrammelled exploitation of natural resources, for they shall enable us and
our children and our grandchildren to have an earth to inherit. Praised be! Hallelu!

[based
on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, June 27th,
2015]

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